From boy band member to solo artist: the media representation of Harry Styles’ success story in two British newspapers

Details

Supervisors

Arblaster, Paul

Faculty

Faculté de philosophie, arts et lettres

Degree label

Master [120] en communication multilingue, à finalité spécialisée: langues des affaires

Abstract

enCelebrities have always occupied a prominent place in the media. Their representation is constructed not only through the coverage of their professional activities, but also through discussions of their personal lives and appearance. This thesis therefore focuses on the representation of one celebrity, Harry Styles, in the British press. This study combines quantitative and qualitative analyses to examine the media discourse surrounding Styles across two timeframes: the One Direction period, from July 2010 to December 2015, and Styles’ solo career, from May 2017 to August 2023. The corpus contains 1,985 articles published in a quality newspaper, The Guardian, and a tabloid, the Daily Mail. The aim was to compare these two kinds of newspapers to see whether their representations of Harry Styles differed. The quantitative analysis looked at the overall trends and the generic frames developed by Semetko and Valkenburg (2000), while the qualitative analysis examined four articles in greater depth using the framing mechanisms identified by Tankard (2001). The results show that the human-interest frame was the most present in both newspapers, and remained dominant across the two timeframes. Its presence remained stable, but the way in which it was constructed changed. Although both newspapers portrayed Harry Styles’ transition positively, The Guardian focused more on his musical abilities and the Daily Mail on his personal development.